Radio review

The Most Godless Town in Britain (Radio 4), presented by Jolyon Jenkins, showed how radio documentaries should be done. The topic was a good one: to see how the Anglican church is attempting to build spirituality in Telford, a town with one of the UK's lowest per capita church attendances. But it was the way the story was told that did the vital work, with Jenkins firmly from the raised-eyebrow school of reporting, but never nasty with it.

So gently did he put his points across that all the nice Christians agreed with everything he said.

"I'm not sure you know how to do it," he told Mark Berry, whose job for three years has been to drum up religious interest in Telford. "No," Berry agreed.

The way so far appears to have been to tag along with anything new-agey, and not mention Jesus if possible. Even at the "Christian answer to Glastonbury", Telford's efforts were a bit religion-lite, with high hopes for a "gong shower" where a man hits a gong very hard and makes a shimmering noise that some find very spiritual. "My main experience was mainly of being assailed by a very loud noise," said Jenkins, not sounding noticeably closer to God.

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About this article

Radio review

This article appeared on p28 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Wednesday 28 January 2009.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 19.01 EST on Wednesday 28 January 2009.
It was last modified at 19.37 EST on Wednesday 28 January 2009.
It was first published at 19.37 EST on Wednesday 28 January 2009.